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As I have mentioned in a previous post, at my current job, with the help of our team, I run a weekly “idea meeting” on Fridays. Since our dear colleague, Katie Gehrt, was leaving us for an awesome job opportunity in Kentucky, we decided that we needed to do something special for her last idea meeting/last day in the office. I put a call out to think of something good for her last idea meeting with us. We decided that since Katie was headed to Kentucky, that a Kentucky Derby theme was in order. I had an idea, shared it with the team, and we ran with it. I broke out some painters tape and a giant straight edge, measuring ever four inches for the “track” game board spaces.

Now, for the creative part: create a horse, paper monster, or whatever your heart desires and name your creature. There was a wide range of creatures: a super-accurate realist horse and racer, an animal cracker-sized horse, a daisy duke jort-wearing bear, a cubist horse, a piece of toast with a long tongue, a Scooby-Doo-looking horse and racer, a pink slime monster, and a green horned monster.

After the decorating was over, we got down to business and raced our creatures along the track. There were conspiracy theories that I somehow rigged the paper die to keep rolling sixes. Whatever the case may be, I won, with Katie in a close second, and Sara rounded out the top three.

Although there was no direct connection to design, sometimes activities like this one get us away from our desks and refresh our brains, allowing us to renew ourselves and keep fresh.

At my current job, I have been given the opportunity to hold weekly “Idea meetings.” These are held late Friday morning to cap off the week with any work-related idea farming, or just to share what anyone is currently working on or has recently finished. Then, if time allows, we do some sort of an activity, usually pulled from my Caffeine for the Creative Team book. A few weeks ago, I had an idea that I thought I would try out.

I brought a bunch of empty paper towel and toilet paper rolls in and asked our team members to bring a pair of scissors with them. The instructions were as follows: Create anything out of these rolls using only scissors (no tape, glue, etc.). The concept behind this challenge was that we are given very little to work with on a daily basis, and expected to turn it into something great. This is something we deal with all the time, granted our clients don’t bring us a bag of cardboard before we start a project for them, but the overall concept is the same. You could use any type of raw material to do this type of activity, too. I would like to do this again using a completely different medium, but similar parameters.

The team seemed to enjoy the activity and the creations turned out great. Here they are: